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Encyclopedic information and pragmatic interpretation

  • Károly Bibok

    Károly Bibok is Associate Professor at the Department of Russian Philology, University of Szeged, Hungary. He is the editor of Dissertationes Slavicae: Sectio Linguistica (University of Szeged, Hungary); co-editor (with Enikő Németh T.) of Pragmatics and the Flexibility of Word Meaning (Elsevier, 2001), The Role of Data at the Semantics–Pragmatics Interface (De Gruyter Mouton, 2010) and two special issues on Hungarian pragmatics research of Acta Linguistica Hungarica (2004, 2005). His special area of interest includes lexical pragmatics and the relationship between linguistics of the Russian language and theoretical linguistics.

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Published/Copyright: September 10, 2016
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Abstract

Considering the interaction between grammar and pragmatics, the present paper aims to thoroughly investigate the role played by encyclopedic information in the lexicon and in pragmatic construction of utterance meaning. With the help of a series of subtle analyses of Hungarian and Russian data, several types of encyclopedic information are identified both in encoded lexical-semantic representations of word senses and inferential mechanisms of utterance interpretation. It is demonstrated that representations and mechanisms are mutually connected to each other. More precisely, on the one hand, requirements on representations are raised by a considerable number of possible utterance meanings, and, on the other, special mechanisms are needed to construct them from lexical-semantic representations. It is the attempt to account for such mutual connections that forms a novel and promising conception of lexical pragmatics.

About the author

Károly Bibok

Károly Bibok is Associate Professor at the Department of Russian Philology, University of Szeged, Hungary. He is the editor of Dissertationes Slavicae: Sectio Linguistica (University of Szeged, Hungary); co-editor (with Enikő Németh T.) of Pragmatics and the Flexibility of Word Meaning (Elsevier, 2001), The Role of Data at the Semantics–Pragmatics Interface (De Gruyter Mouton, 2010) and two special issues on Hungarian pragmatics research of Acta Linguistica Hungarica (2004, 2005). His special area of interest includes lexical pragmatics and the relationship between linguistics of the Russian language and theoretical linguistics.

Acknowledgments

An earlier brief version of this paper was delivered at the 4th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication in Madrid, Spain, held on 15–17 November, 2010. The research reported in the present paper was supported by the MTA-DE Research Group for Theoretical Linguistics. – I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for encouraging me to clarify my argumentation at several points. I also wish to thank Anna Fenyvesi for correcting my English as well as Natália Sajtos and Irina Bagmut for discussing the Russian examples.

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Published Online: 2016-9-10
Published in Print: 2016-9-1

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